Of course, Congress could just change this … but the people in the territories have no representation there. Good luck with that.

Next time someone comes up with a central plan for anything, please remember that the key word is central, and that the plan is the window dressing. You’d never support a “central”, but people will often support a “central plan”; please remember that most of what you’ll get will be just a “central” … even though I’ve never heard of anyone asking for one of those.

If it isn't both fungible and valuable, no one worries about its inequality. If it's both fungible and valuable, they do.

So, we don't care about inequality of respect ... not because it isn't valuable, but because it isn't fungible. For example, someone could (in the spirit of the TV season) transfer their major award to you, but you wouldn't really feel like it's yours. Or, as a professor, I get more respect than many other professionals, but no one would be interested in me transferring some of that respect to them; it would be silly, and we all know it.

More to the point, many jobs are paid with in-kind benefits (like the employee of the rock/gem shop I was in on Christmas Eve who can buy the earrings at cost rather than the retail price). The distribution of semi-precious stones is seriously unequal, but no one worries about that because some people just don't find them that valuable. Alternatively, employees of restaurants can often buy entrees at cost, so again there's an unequal distribution of Big Macs and shrimp scampi. But we don't worry about that inequality because those items, while fungible, depreciate quickly enough that the fungibility doesn't matter much.

So no, we worry about cash income inequality: because the cash is valuable, and it's fungible. Once it's out of their hands, and into ours, we're richer and no one can tell why.

I'd go further and argue that this is why we're more concerned about income inequality than wealth inequality too (in spite of the fact that wealth is distributed far more unequally). Income is almost always in money. Wealth is often converted to not so liquid stuff ... that no one is interested in transferring.

In my case, as I approach 50, I have some of my wealth stored in phones-that-worked-the-last-time-I-used-them, open spice containers, polaroids, opened cans of paint, pens I've picked up somewhere, and so on. No one who's young, and most people who are poor, has such things. But they don't want them either. Instead, they want the portion of my wealth that retains value, and that if put in their hands, would give them value with no strings attached: mostly, that's money.

… The new American mandatory insurance system has shortcomings that are not necessarily related to the idea of mandatory insurance - as instead with the bureaucratic superfetations of such a system engendered by the way the US Administration has planned it.

I like that idea: layers of bureaucracy being added onto existing layers of bureaucracy (perhaps, because the earlier layers aren’t working well).

I’ve always described bureaucracy as continuing revisions of a Frankenstein monster: it didn’t quite work the first time, so we’re going to staple on some new part and hope for the best.

You don’t think all the guys are blowing off work that day to compensate for a slow weekend, do you?*

They also report a slim majority of porn is now viewed on mobile devices.

Enforcing morality is always like a water balloon: put pressure on one end, and a bulge pops out somewhere else. In this case, most businesses frown on using their networks to connect to porn sites, so employees are just using their phones.†

* Sorry to be politically incorrect, but I figure it’s still OK to point out that the sexes are not equal on amount of time spent viewing porn.

† One of the most interesting factoids I’ve ever heard about Utah came from a plant manager I used to know. The most likely cause for firing the 30% of his workforce that wasn’t Mormon was drugs, while the most likely cause for the 70% that were Mormon was sneaking off to view porn on the plant’s computers.

P.S. I’ve just made myself laugh really hard. People are sometimes perplexed why I don’t use my smartphone more. Maybe it’s because I’ve never, ever, viewed porn on it. (FWIW: I mostly don’t use my phone because I spend a lot of my worktime parked at a terminal, and not so much on the move).

A worrying trend is that the proportion of people who want to work, taken out of the whole population (known as the labor force participation rate, and just as “participation” below), is declining.

It has been declining, fairly steadily, for the past 15 years. I view this as primarily demographic: we are in an echo of the baby boom of 60 years ago. That means we have relatively more people in their 20’s and 30’s right now … who aren’t always inclined to join the labor force in a timely fashion.

I have been emphasizing to students since Fall 2009 that the job market is actually pretty good for graduates. It’s an urban myth that it isn’t. Where it is bad is for people who’ve put some sort of “red mark” on their resume (you know … checkered work history, failed drug tests, poorly managed mental illness, etc.). Those people tend to be a bit older.

But, maybe not.

An alternative decomposition of the labor force participation data has been provided by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. They do two things: 1) break participation down by age group, and then 2) correct for the net movement of people from one age group to another. The heart of their result is this chart:

The bars clearly will sum to something negative: this is the overall decline in participation.

One important fact is that the population has been aging, largely due to improvements in health outcomes of seniors. This means a lot more seniors, and seniors are less inclined to work. The green indicates more seniors, and the big negative bar means less participation from them. This is the biggest component of the drop in participation. So it’s not the echo of the baby boom — but the baby boom itself — that is causing participation to drop.

The two bars covering middle age are more problematic. These have green components to them, indicating that more people are surviving into middle age (again, due to better health care, and probably also reductions in violent crime). But now we have a blue bar too: this indicates people who are less inclined to participate but haven’t aged into a new group (yet). These are the people with “red marks” on their resume. Reasonable people can quibble about whether a particular person deserves their red mark, but there’s no debating that, on average, middle-aged people are less inclined to be participating.

N.B. Disability claims might be part of that. But, in earlier posts I dismissed that possibility: rates of disability are actually in line with what they’ve been for a generation or more.

Now, looking at the two bars for the young, the green indicates the echo of the baby boom: participation is bumped up a little bit because of young people. But the blue bar is still there for the second group; and again this is suggestive of “red marks”.

And for the youngest group … participation looks great. On average, there is no job problem for students.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Genesis

Information

With the development of internet technology, work at home jobs are increasing in the market. Also setting up small business online with ones own bank savings can provide excellent work at home opportunities. Apart from savings, banks offer0 credit card to cater to short term finance needs. Partial tax payments like tax credits are also available to promote online businesses. Market now offers several alternatives to traditional credit card debt which are helpful to work at home businesses.